Mathemagenic

One more on writing, from Gabriela (emphasis added, I just loved this nesting):

A lot of people have blogged about reboot - I gave up the idea because I wanted to focus on what was going on. A Romanian writer said once: "you either live, or write", which might seem a bit odd to a blogger. We're living while we're writing - or is it vice versa? writing while we're living? Anyhow, this time there were so many better bloggers around, that I felt like letting go!

Also: Real-time conference blogging: reporting vs. reflecting

Pretty much on what I tried to say in Mangrove effect: the value of making things explicit - but narrowed down to writing as a method of data analysis:

I use writing as a method of data analysis by using writing to think; that is, I wrote my way into particular spaces I could not have occupied by sorting data with a computer program or by analytic induction. This was rhizomatic work (Deleuze&Guattari, 1980/1987) in which I made accidental and fortuitous connections I could not foresee or control. My point here is that I did not limit data analysis to conventional practices of coding data and then sorting it into categories that I then grouped into themes that became section headings in an outline that organized and governed my writing in advance of writing. Thought happened in the writing. As I wrote, I watched word after word appear on the computer screen - ideas, theories, I had not thought before I wrote them. [p.970]

And another one, just because it takes to the extreme some of my feelings (=I'm more moderate about audit trails and data saturation :)

And it is thinking of writing in this way that breaks down the distinction in conventional qualitative inquiry between data collection and data analysis - one more assault to the structure. Both happen at once. [...] Data collection and data analysis cannot be separated when writing is a method of inquiry. And positivist concepts, such as audit trails and data saturation, become absurd and then irrelevant in postmodern qualitative inquiry in which writing is a field of play where anything can happen - and it does. [p.971]

Both quotes are from Richardson, L. & St.Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N.K.Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959-978). SAGE Publications.

Wikipedia entry on rhizome in philosophy: I don't understand much, but the fact that Carl Jung used the word "to emphasize the invisible and underground nature of life" is intriguing.